Women: Gender-Specific Treatment

Video Transcript

: Do men and women's bodies really function that differently?

Marianne Legato, MD: The differences are profound and as we explore they are much more molecular even than we realized.There was a study from UCLA that was just published that showed that thousands of genes in the body are expressed differently, the same genes,but they are expressed differently as a function of whether the person is a male or female. So as I said, there are nuances, and an abundance of differences that we had never even suspected.They extend to every system of the body, from the brain to our skin and they have important implications for how we prevent, diagnose and treat illness.The very way that men and women metabolize the same drugs can be drastically differentand we have just heard a report form the dentists once again, that some analgesics work better in women than they do in men.So we are at the beginning, or one might say just starting on a voyage of discovery about all of the amazing differences between the sexes.